The web page for
COMP1511 18s2
is located at:
Please take the time to complete this survey about COMP1511 .
It is to gather extra information that the standard UNSW myExperience survey does not provide. Please help us improve COMP1511 by taking the time to complete the survey.
The survey is optional and not anonymous - you supply your zid. This allows us to combine your answers with other information. The information at the top of the survey explains more.
Also I'll be my office (K17 401G) tomorrow (Friday) at 15:30 if anyone wishes to inspect exam marking or discuss assessment. I will announce an office time in week 0 for the same purpose.
I'll be in my office K17 401G Monday (July 9) 15:00 if you want to inspect the marking of your exam.
You can also discuss any other issues with COMP1511 assessment, but please note there is a faculty policy that, for example, falling 1 mark short of a HD/DN/CR, is not sufficient reason to review a student's assessment.
I'll announce another office time in week 1 of session 2.
Provisional COMP1511 marks are now available here or by running 1511 classrun -sturec
The field provisional_final_mark contains what I expect will be your final mark for COMP1511.
Hopefully provisional_final_mark contains a mark >= 50 and a grade of PS, CR, DN or HD. If so (provisionally) you have met all hurdles and other requirements and have passed COMP1511 - congratulations, COMP1511 was a tough course and many of you had to work very hard over the past months to get here.
Provisional marks can also change, for example when calculation errors are discovered but so far I've never changed a provisional PS to a FL.
If our provisional_final_mark field contains the grade FL or AF unfortunately you have not passed COMP1511 and are not being offered further assessment. You will need to retake in COMP1511 if it is required for your degree. You will also have to un-enrol from any 18s2 COMP courses which require COMP1511 as prerequisite such as COMP1521, COMP1521 & COMP2521.
If your provisional_final_mark field contains the grade WD this indicates your COMP1511 mark and grade is yet to be determined.
If the field supp_exam_offered contains the value Y es then this is because you've been being offered the opportunity to sit a supplementary exam. There are 2 possible reasons for this:
1) You were absent from the final exam due to illness etc - the supplementary exam will be used in place of the final exam to calculate your final mark.
2) You have not met the requirements to pass COMP1511, e.g. failed a hurdle, but are being given another opportunity to meet these requirements and pass COMP1511. If you do not take this opportunity you will not pass COMP1511.
Note if you sat the final exam can not raise your mark beyond 50 no matter how good your performance on the supplementary exam is. If you already have a mark >50 but need to complete a hurdle, a successful supplementary exam will not raise your mark, but is required to pass COMP1511.
The supplementary exam will be held on Friday 20 July. The format will be similar to the final exam (but no skeleton sorry). It is tentatively scheduled for 9:45-13:00 J17 Level 3. You will be emailed exact details of location & time by Thursday 19 July.
Some students have the grade WD due to investigation into assignment plagiarism, these students should already have email from me with details.
General queries about exam marking should be asked in the class forum but please first readanswers to previous questions and the following information.
Part 1 was automarked using patterns (regular-expressions) but the marker was shown all answers matching the patterns and the marker adjusted the patterns to include all variants of correct (or partially correct) answers. Marks were not deducted for spelling mistakes, obvious typos, extra spaces, blank lines ...
If you scored less than full
marks
for a part 2 question, your answer must have failed at least one auto-
marking
test. Answers that passed all marking tests received full
marks
. Conversely you could
fail automarking tests and get full
marks
, if the reason for failing auto-
marking
tests was unimportant (e.g extra whitespace).
Your marks for the individual exam questions should also be visible. I don't release exam questions or answers (yours or mine). I'll announce office times before session 2 where you can inspect your exam marking if you wish.
I hope you all managed to demonstrate all you have learnt in COMP1511 in today's exam. Most of the questions should have been what you were expecting, even if they were not easy.
Unfortunately the students in the morning exam session were accidentally given the solution to the last question on part 2. Huge apologies, I completed the question myself in exam environment yesterday, so at some stage after that I must have accidentally replaced the starting code with the solution.
I replaced Question 8 was replaced (on the spot) with a past question of similar difficulty. At this stage of the (morning) exam very few students should have commenced the question as it was the last question in part 2. If you had commenced it, and you feel you have significantly disadvantaged in the exam, please email me (andrewt@unsw.edu.au).
You may email me if you feel anything else in the running of the exam, has significantly disadvantaged you personally. Practical exams are a much better way to assess a programming course than a paper but there are more things that can go wrong than a paper exam. You may not get a reply until exam marking is complete, as typically I have to to see your exam marks to know if, and how, issues should be best addressed.
Issues that affect multiple students are better raised in the forum.
You will get an email when provisional marks are released - due to the number of exams to be marked this is unlikely to be before July 2.
The exam skeletons for part 1 and part 2 of the final exam are now available.
Please recheck your seating allocation for tomorrow's exam.
Please plan to arrive early, Sydney buses and trains can not be relied on to run on time.
If you are allocated to the morning session, your seating allocation will be a computer lab. Note mmea and mmeb are the mechanical engineering labs J17-204 and J17-203 on the second floor of the J17 building immediately below CSE's J17 level 3 labs.
If you are allocated to the afternoon session, your seating allocation will be a tute/lecture room. Go to that room and do not be late. You can not start the exam if you are late to the tute/lecture room. You will be taken from that room to a computer lab.
You must bring your student card. You can bring pens and a transparent, unmarked water bottle. No other exam materials are allowed. You can not bring paper, phones, watches, calculators, laptops ...
Good luck.
COMP1511 exam seating is now available Apologies for the delay, the size of COMP1511 means the exam presents considerable logistical difficulties.
Please let us know about any problems and please monitor your email in the days before the exam in case we need to notify you of changes.
The slides and some videos from Wednesday wonderful revision session are linked here .
Apologies for sound in some of the videos + two videos are missing and will be added if they can be recovered.
The code will be add at the same location soon.
Huge thank you to all the tutors who put this session on.
In other news, questions and solutions are available for the week 13 practice exam. There deliberately aren't answers for part 1, to encourage you to run programs to check your understanding.
I've also linked the videos prepared by last year's 1511 tutors under revision topics on the
class home page
to encourage you to watch these excellent explanations of topics.
I'm still working on assignment 3 and the practice exam automarking may not be available until mid-next sorry,
As well as the revision sessions being put on right now by the wonderful COMP1511 tutors, there are revision exercises with autotests now available on these topics:
Solutions for the revision exercises are currently set to release Monday midnight - although this can be made earlier/later based on student feedback (in the forum).
The amazing COMP1511 tutors are putting a series of revision sessions on tomorrow.
They still finalizing the details (if anything major changes we'll send email) but the current plan is for these session to run tomorrow:
J17 G03 11:00-13:00 memory, arrays, pointers, functions, strings, i/o, structs
J17 201 13:00-15:00 informal Q&A on whatever topics students want; hopefully also live-streamed so students can ask questions remotely
J17 202, 13:00-15:00
pointers, structs, pointers to structs and linked lists
J17 G03, 14:00-16:00 linked lists, stacks and queues, sorting and searching, exam prep tips, debugging
As the CSE labs will be used for COMP1511 and other exams, we are keen to have any issues with lab computers fixed. If you are using the labs and notice problems with a lab computer such as the mouse not working properly, can you email a report to helpdesk@cse.unsw.edu.au please. Please include in your email the nature of the problem and which lab machine.
If you missed your week 13 lab and did not do the practice exam, an extra exam will be held Wednesday (6th) 16:00. This is only for students who missed their Week 13 lab - you can't do the practice exam twice.
You will (potentially) receive a lab mark but the important thing is to familiarize yourself with the exam environment.
If you wish to attend please register here
The wonderful COMP1511 tutors are also planning to run revision classes Wednesday, tentatively 11:00-16:00, time and location will be announced by email.
Students are getting an error (usually no assigned address) when attempting to connect to the UNSW VPN to use vlab. This means the UNSW VPN has reached a limit on the number of simultaneous users - and will be affecting students and staff across UNSW. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about this, and I'd guess the same problem is likely to also occur tomorrow afternoon/evening.
You can bypass need for the UNSW VPN by using VLAB port 5920 (try tigervnc if this doesn't work with your VNC client).
Alternatively the home computing resources explain how to connect to CSE login servers which doesn't require the UNSW VPN. This is a little more complicated to set up, but is more powerful and, it is what probably you'll use in later COMP courses.
As Monday is stuvac there can't be an extension for assignment 3 sorry.
The size of the world in the Fruit Bot Tournament increased yesterday afternoon. This was an overdue change to cope with increasing number of bots. This broke about 8 bots completely and affected the strategies of some others. Although nothing in the assignment spec or fruit_bot.h indicating you can assume the former tournament world size, and when people asked on the forum they were told the world size would increase, this increase should have been more advertised so student weren't surprised.
This doesn't affect single-bot testing. Single-bot testing will be in the tiny , medium and large worlds you've been using with the fruit bot referee, and worlds of similar size but with different fruit, etc.
It affects students trying to get a HD for the assignment by successfully tackling the more difficult problems multi-bot worlds present. If you are in this category please check how you bot is performing now - make sure your bot hasn't broken.
If you have a bot that was performing very well in the multi-bot world and after the world size change does badly and you have other commitments which prevent you submitting a fixed bot before tomorrow's deadline, you can ask your tutor to consider adjusting your mark.
The bots which broke after the world size increase were using algorithm whose execution speed grew much faster than the world size. We introduced this concept in the lecture on sorting. You'll learn much more in subsequent courses. The bots whose strategy became poor had been essentially overfitted , a concept you'll learn more if you take later courses in AI or machine learning. The situation where multiple bots repeatedly and unsuccessfully trying to buy the same item is also one form of a classic computer science problem you'll meet again.
Don't forget the last weekly test is due tonight if you haven't done it. And a huge thank you to Rob from our systems staff who fixed the file server hosting COMP1511 at 1am this morning.
Tomorrow is the day to withdraw from session 1 courses, if you are considering this please read information here and here carefully first and see your program authority for advice.
The COMP1511 Final Exam will be held Friday 15 June in two sessions:
You can indicate a preference for an exam session: here
This is optional. If you don't really care which session you get - please don't enter a preference.
As many students as possible will be given their preference but it may not be possible to give all students their preference .
Students with a clashing
exam
are automatically allocated a place in the appropriate
session
. You do not have to register a
preference
. The above link should show you as already allocated to the non-clashing session.
Student with a religious or other major reason for attending a particular session should indicate a preference using the link above ASAP. If when allocations are released you are not allocated to the session you need - contact us (email cs1511) and we'll ensure your get the allocation you need.
Students with special exam conditions should already have e-mail from me regarding exam conditions.
You have until 12:00 (noon) Monday to enter a preference. Session allocation will be announced via email by Thursday next week. This email will also tell you about exam seating arrangements.
Students in the morning session will be given a lab to go straight to.
Students in the afternoon session will be directed to a class room
You can not leave the morning session early.
You can not attempt the afternoon session if you arrive late.
Dean Wunder has made another video designed to help students struggling to get their fruit bot working. Checkout it out if your bot is not already delivering fruit successfully.
And reminder today was the last COMP1511 lecture. Tut-labs are on tomorrow
We'll send you emails about a couple of things we'd like you to look at it (but they won't be in exam).
There is industrial action by UNSW academics Wednesday. I am not certain what is happening generally at UNSW but for COMP1511 this is what I can tell you.
Tomorrow (Tuesday's) lecture will cover the COMP1511 exam & assessment generally (which was to be covered Wednesday).
We will circulate some material to watch/read covering topics that were to be covered in Tuesday's lecture. There will not be exam questions on this material .
I believe Wednesday tut-labs will be on as usual, but please monitor your email in case any tut-labs are cancelled.
We will try to schedule some extra week 13 tut-labs (early next week) in stuvac but this will depend on the availability of tutors (who also have exams) and labs.
Reminder this week's lab is a practice exam. You will do several questions, similar to weekly test questions, under simulated exam conditions in the exam environment which will be used for the final exam. Your week 13 lab mark will be based (automarked) on the answers you submit in the exam environment during your lab. You can not submit on answers after your lab. The lab exercises page includes a little explanation, but your tutors will tell explain everything you need to know anyway.
It is very important you attend this lab to familiarize yourself with the exam environment, so you don't waste time in the final exam.
This week's test is available . You have until Saturday (June 2) to complete the test
This week's test focuses again on linked lists.
As usual please set aside exactly an hour and complete it under exam conditions.
Please don't panic if you can't complete all 3 questions - as usual its meant to be hard to complete under exam conditions and time pressure - if you can do 2 questions that is great.
This is the last weekly test. I hope they've given you good feedback on your progress at learning to code in C, and I hope they leave you well prepared for the exam.
The Fruit Bot Tournament is on. Submit your bot to join the fun. I expect there are bugs/issues to be ironed out, please let us know in the forum.
The fruit_bot_referee now contains a large world:
1511 fruit_bot_referee -w large fruit_bot.c
(or you can create your own world - see lab 11 for examples)
The last COMP1511 weekly test will be released later today - due next Saturday.
It is likely there will be changes to next weeks lectures due to Wednesday's industrial action. I expect Tuesday's lecture will cover the exam - full details will be announced by email Monday afternoon.
The
solutions to lab11
are available to help you get started on assignment 3.
Matt Damon
Dean Wunder is very kindly making videos to help you, if you are having trouble understanding them:
Remember the week 11 test is due tomorrow (Friday).
And if you know anything about a laptop left in Wednesday's Mathew's A lecture- please let the distressed owner know in the class forum.
This week's test is available . You have until Friday (May 24) to complete the test
This week's test focuses on linked lists.
As usual please set aside exactly an hour and complete it under exam conditions.
Please don't panic if you can't complete all 3 questions - as usual its meant to be hard to complete under exam conditions and time pressure - if you can do 2 questions that is great.
There is a religious holiday this weekend (Shavuot) and the assignment didn't give Monday/Tuesday labs time to prepare this week, so I've extended the lab deadline to Tuesday midnight. Lab solutions will be released Wed 12:00.
COMP1511 tutors were worried that students were accidentally or deliberately ignoring the requirement in lab exercises that your functions not change the fruit bot world (not change east & west pointers)
I've updated the lab autotests adding checks for this. The challenge exercise autotest has been similarly updated.
If you've already completed lab exercises for this week, please rerun the autotests to make sure you've understood the lab exercise (hopefullyyou have).
This is important as your functions won't be useful for the assignment if they destroy the crucial information in the structs representing the fruit bot world. The automarking tests for the lab exercises will include the same checks.
Assignment 3 is out. Yes I know - you are all exhausted from assignment 2 - but the extension to assignment 2 has left no gap between assignments.
We need to cover assignment 3 in this weeks tuts and lab to help you get started. The tut will explain this assignment in detail, and in the lab you write code you can use in the assignment. We'll also talk about the assignment in Wednesday's lecture. Please read the assignment if you can before your tut-lab/Wednesday's lecture. Don't panic the assignment is easier than it seems.
The number of COMP1511 students trying to finish assignment 2 is apparently overwhelming CSE and UNSW network infrastructure. I've extended the deadline for 24 hours to Monday 23:59 to make sure everyone gets their assignment in.
We'll try but we may not be able to stop the same issues happening tomorrow night. So please make an assignment submission during the day tomorrow, if you can't do it tonight. Don't plan on being able to connect to CSE at 23:30 tomorrow night! If you can't connect tomorrow night - sorry its your problem - there will be a late penalty (see assignment spec)
Remember only your last submission is marked.
And a huge thank you to the tutors answering the deluge of last minute questions.
There are help sessions on this afternoon if you need last minute help with assignment 2.
They weren't originally scheduled for this afternoon because assignment was originally due earlier this week.
A big thank you to the tutors who've put aside work on their own courses to help COMP1511 students.
The help session will be running from 2-6pm today (Friday Week 10) becaue assignment is due this weekend. Help Sessions page has been updated.
This week's test is available . You have until Thursday (May 17) to complete the test.
This week's test focuses on line-based I/O (fgets, reading lines to end of input, ...)
As usual please set aside exactly an hour and complete it under exam conditions.
Please don't panic if you can't complete all 3 questions - as usual its meant to be hard to complete under exam conditions and time pressure - if you can do questions that is great.
Assignment 2 is due Sunday so we are extending the deadline for this week's lab 2 days to Tuesday (May 15) so it doesn't clash.
This week' test is available You have until Wednesday (May 9) midnight to complete the test.
This week's test focuses on character-based I/O (getchar, reading characters to end of input, ...).
As usual please set aside exactly an hour and complete it under exam conditions.
The final exam is getting closer and we want you to perform at your best under exam conditon and exam pressure.
COMP1511's Matt Damon, Dean Wunder, has made a sequel to his highly successful video Intensity: the Rules of the Game
If you are having trouble starting assignment 2: Intensity: the Inputs to Your Program is a must watch.
Last year some COMP1511 tutors put a lot of work into videos to help students understand the difficult topics in COMP1511.
We'll post separate links to these videos with the course materials for these topics - note we've only covered some of these topics so far (pointers, malloc, structs, part of linked lists) - the rest are in upcoming lectures.
The COMP1511 also made great videos on debugging and home computing
If you are revising labs Dean has also made videos explaining some key lab exercises.
If you have a topic you'd like Dean or another tutor to make videos explaining - please post a request in the forum.
The COMP1511 final exam will be Friday 15/06 in CSE's labs.
We run two sessions of the exam because we can't fit the entire class into the labs.
The morning session will be 09:15-12:30
The afternoon session will be 12:20-16:10
You will be allocated to one of these sessions.
If you have another exam on 15/06 you will be automatically allocated to the COMP1511 exam session that does not clash with your other exam. You do not need to do anything. You will be able to attend both your COMP1511 and the other exams.
By Friday 08/06 we will announce a web form allowing you to register a preference for one of the sessions on 15/06. If you have non-exam commitments on 15/06 please indicate your preference, and we will try to allocate you to your preferred session if possible.
Exam session allocation will be released by Friday 08/06. This will give you your exam time and location.
Students with exam requirements registered with SEADU will be sent email regarding their exam requirements.
If you have exam requirements registered with SEADU and do not receive email by the end of week 13 please contact us.
Note both sessions sit the same exam. For this reason, students can not leave the morning session early. Students sitting
the afternoon exam arrive before the morning exam finishes and are supervised in separate rooms. Hence you can not sit the afternoon exam if you arrive late (allow for late buses, trains, ...)
Questions about the exam will only be answered in the class forum. All information about the exam must be available to the entire class. Please don't email questions about exam content, format, marking, etc. The last lecture in week 13 will discuss the exam. Please leave questions about the exam until after it.
Thank you to everyone who has complete the poll about assignment 2. We are concerned at the number of students who haven't made progress with the assignment. Part of this week's tutorial will be devoted to helping you get started on assignment 2 and the deadline for the assignment has been extended to Sunday May 13. Apologies for any inconvenience.
Its important you all have a good opportunity to learn from building a program which is larger and more complex than lab exercises.
I was talking last week to a former student who has a very interesting job at Microsoft in the US. She said coding & debugging C labs & assignments in COMP1917 (COMP1511's predecessor) was in retrospect where she learnt the most useful skills at CSE - even though she doesn't code in C currently.
The extension will mean assignment 3 will be due at the end of week 13.
Please let us know how assignment 2 is going by completing this poll
The Intensity Tournament is underway.
The full leaderboard is here .
You can see who is hot (best last 10 games) here .
Details of your player's games are here .
When you submit intensity.c with give you'll get asked if you want to take part in the tournament.
Remember to submit intensity.c with give every time you work on it, even if you don't want to join the fun of the tournament.
Every time you use give a copy of your code is commited to CSE's gitlab repository. This allows you to retrieve any past version of your code.
I hope you are enjoying quiet week. This week's weekly test is available . You have until Wednesday(May 2) midnight to complete the test.
As students found last week's test difficult and its absolutely vital you understand these topics (arrays, loops, functions) this week's test has very similar questions to last week.
Before attempting this week's test, you might revise by reattempting last week's questions without exam conditions. Sample solutions for last week's questions will be released at midnight tonight.
The draft automarking for assignment 1 (time2code) can be viewed here
If you believe the automarking is incorrect please ask about it in the course forum, after checking that someone else hasn't already asked the same question. I'll rerun the automarking if there are errors that need to be fixed.
After any problems with the automarking are fixed, I'll release to the tutors so they can complete the hand marking component which is 25% of the mark.
If there are issues affecting only you, talk to your tutor. They can adjust your assignment mark if appropriate.
Students have asked for a little more time with the lab 7 challenge exercises so I've extended the deadline to tonight, for the challenge exercises only.
Reminder: this is quiet week for COMP1511. There are no COMP1511 tutorials, lab or lectures this week.
Last week's test is due Wednesday so you do have to spend an hour on that if you haven't already. The next weekly test will be released Thursday. And you have assignment 2 to work on.
Hi everyone,
We have created videos covering how to solve some of the lab exercises. These are a great resource to use if you want to revise the content you've learned or to better understand how an aspect of programming works.
Currently, we have two videos for last week's lab:
Devowelling Text - Helpful for input and output using getchar() and putchar(), and using functions.
Caesar Cipher - Helpful for understanding command line arguments and functions.
You can access these videos (and videos for future weeks) in the "Tutorials, Labs and Weekly Tests" section on the course website.
April 22 is the deadline to drop a session 1 course with financial liability but without academic penalty .
Basically the course will not appear on your transcript but you will pay for it.
But I and other COMP1511 staff can't give you advice about this. For example, there are important conditions that apply to international students and scholarship holders.
Talk to your program authority if you need advice.
If you are in a computing degree you can go to the student office ground floor of the K17 building for advice.
Week 8 is quiet week for COMP1511. There are no lectures, tutorials or labs next week. Please ignore any COMP1511 class shown in your timetable for next week.
Your other UNSW classes will be as usual next week except there are no UNSW classes Wednesday as it is a public holiday (Anzac Day).
The automarking for the week 5 lab & test exercises, the week 6 test exercise and the week 6 standard lab exercises has been done and you can view the results here
The resulting lab & test marks can be
viewed here
.
The lab06 challenge exercise are due tonight so lab06 marks are not yet complete.
If you believe the automarking is incorrect please ask about it in the course forum,
after checking
someone else hasn't already asked the same question. I'll rerun the automarking if there are errors that need to be fixed.
If there are issues affecting only you, talk to your tutor. They can adjust your lab or test mark if appropriate.
Assignment 1 automarking will be available next week
The fifth weekly coding test is now available
You have until Wednesday 25th) midnight to attempt.
As usual please treat it seriously set aside an hour either in CSE labs or at home and attempt it like it is an exam.
During this hour you can't ask for help (including in the class forum). use the internet look at class materials or view previous programs you've written. You will be able to do none of these in the final exam.
You can ask the class forum if a question is unclear or the autotests appear incorrect..
You can continue working on the questions after the hour is up, if you wish, but do not run give after the hour is up.
Please do not worry if can't complete all the questions. The weekly tests are deliberately set to give you experience of working under time pressure to prepare you for the final exam.
If you can do 0 of the 3 questions in the weekly test - yes you should be concerned and should urgently be trying to catch up. We will soon posting remedial material which may help you revise.
If you can usually do only 1 of the 3 questions, you can certainly pass the course. You need to keep working hard and again maybe check out the revision material when we post it.
If you can usually do 2 of the 3 questions under exam conditions that is good. You have understood the core material so far.
A rushed draft of assignment 2 is available here . We need to talk about in today's lecture, because there is no lecture next week as its quiet week. Please read the draft before the lecture, but be aware that some explanation will be added and perhaps some changes to the spec or starting point code made Thursday & Friday.
Students are enjoying code-cracking but want extra time, so I've extended the deadline for the week 6 challenge exercises to Friday. This is only the challenge exercises. The standard exercises are still due tonight.
Also, the last two exercises in this week's lab were incorrectly labelled as pair exercises. They are individual challenge exercises.
Next week (week 8) is quiet week - no lectures & no tute-lab.
Assignment 2 will be released by Wednesday, and introduced in Wednesday's lecture.
The fourth weekly test is now available .
You have until Wednesday (18th) midnight to attempt.
As usual its 3 small coding tasks, as usual the third questions is harder, particular with time pressure.
This test will let you see how whether you've learnt how to use arrays of ints in a program.
As usual please treat it seriously set aside an hour either in CSE labs or at home and attempt it like it is an exam.
A lab exercise (letter frequency analysis) was accidentally omitted from this week's lab. Its needed by other lab exercises and has been added now. Huge apologies to Monday people. I've extended the lab deadline to Monday next week to give you a little more time.
Automarking for lab02, lab03, lab04, test03 and test04 exercises can be viewed here .
The resulting lab & test marks can be viewed here .
If you believe the automarking is incorrect please ask about it in the course forum, after checking someone else hasn't already asked the same question. I'll rerun the automarking if there are errors that need to be fixed.
If there are issues affecting only you, talk to your tutor. They can adjust your lab or test mark if appropriate.
Students have asking their tutors for extra time for the weekly test (its only a hour!) so I've extended the deadline 1 day to Thursday.
Don't forget assignment assignment 1 is due tomorrow (Tuesday).
[pronlems were fixed about 6am Saturday]
Server problems affected all CSE computers and all CSE users this evening.
CSE technical staff have fixed some issues but other problems are ongoing - e.g. some students can not login.
This will be fixed as soon as possible. Our apologies.
If you can login but dcc doesn't work for you try running instead 1511 dcc
For example: 1511 dcc farnarkle.c
If problems continue into tomorrow afternoon we'll look at extending current deadlines.
The third weekly test is now available .
You have until Wednesday (11th) midnight to attempt it.
Again its 3 small coding tasks, but this time the third question is a harder, particularly with time pressure.
It'll test how well you've understood if and while statements.
The next weekly test will test arrays and functions.
As usual please treat it seriously set aside an hour either in CSE labs or at home and attempt it like it is an exam.
And really discover what you have and haven't understood so far.
I've upgraded the Farnarkle Tournament so it varies N_TILES and MAX_TILE.
You can assume 2 <= N_TILES && N_TILES <=8
You can assume 4 <= MAX_TILE && MAX_TILE <= 16
I've extended the lab 5 deadline to Sunday midnight to squeeze in more arkling.
But remember assignment 1 is much more important - work on it first.
Wednesday 4th April 6pm - 8pm J17 201 BYOD
Thursday 5th April 6pm - 8pm J17 201 BYOD
Friday 6th April 10am - 12pm Bugle/Horn J17 305
In response to requests from students who are overseas or away from the internet during the mid-semester break, I've extended the assignment 1 deadline 2 days to Tuesday 10th midnight. Apologies if this causes you difficulties.
The tutors are worried that they are seeing some students not putting their code into separate functions. I've added a simple autotest to the assignment to help remind students who seem unaware of this requirement.
Also too few students are apparently adding unit tests as they write their code - or better still before they write their code. I've added an autotest to help remind students to do this.
Check out answers in the course forum if you don't understand what I'm talking about.
Both COMP1511 lecturers will be away from the internet for much of the remaining mid-semester break.
But our wonderful tutors will be answering all your questions in the class forum. Please be nice and read the answers already there before asking questions.
The Farnarkle tournament is underway.
The leaderboard is here .
You can find out more about your farnarkle_ai's performance here .
I've improved the farnarkle_ai autotest. If your code and has been submitted with give and passes the autotest submit it will be added to the tournament
I'll start the tournament late tonight or first thing tomorrow (there aren't enough submissions currently).
The tournament will use N_TILES == 4 && MAX_TILE == 8 to start with. But to make things even more interesting we'll change it code to vary N_TILES and MAX_TILE a little each round (maybe Wednesday)
Reminder: tomorrow (Saturday March 31) is the census date - the last day you can withdraw from a session 1 course without financial penalty.
[this announcement is a copy of https://edstem.org/courses/1950/discussion/74511 ]
If your tute-lab is scheduled on Good Friday, you have one of two options:
- attend
another tute-lab during the week
(timetable of all classes is available here:
https://webcms3.cse.unsw.edu.au/COMP1511/18s1/timetable
)
- attend one of the
make up classes
that have been scheduled
during the COMP1511 lectures.
these are as follows:
Tue 27th March (Week 5)
13:00-14:00 Tutorials
Law101 - Mark
Law276 - Nicholas
Law302 - Sabrina
RedC3037 - Alex
14:00-16:00 Labs
Flute - Mark/Connor, Nicholas
Sitar - Alex, Kevin
Kora - George, Adam
-------------------------------------------
Wed 28th March (Week 5)
14:00-16:00 Lab - Drum - Sabrina, Alex
We've noticed quite a few students not using #defines properly so to help you we've added autotests to the first 2 lab exercises this week (farnarkles & arkles) which check you are using the #defines.
Similarly autotests have been added for the assignment to check you are using #defines propely. We've also added some information to help you use #defines in the assignment specification.
Please rerun the autotests if you've finished those exercises. Ask in the forum if you don't understand, but please read answers already there first.
Hi everyone,
We've made a few updates to the assignment specification .
The most significant change is that there is now an explicit requirement to create additional functions of your own (i.e. you can't have your entire solution in just the get_local_time function without making/calling any other functions of your own).
We have also added further clarification about using the provided #defines, and have restructured the Clarifications/Assumptions/Restrictions section to make it easier to read (but the content is otherwise the same).
We've also added a " changelog " which will list any/all changes made to the assignment specification, so that you can easily tell if something new has been added since you last checked the page. It is unlikely that any major changes will be made, but clarifications / frequently asked questions may be added if/when necessary.
There has also been a minor change to the provided assignment stub code : a header comment has been added with version numbers, so that it's easy for you to tell if there have been any changes made since you downloaded the file.
The second weekly test is now available.
You have until next Friday (30th) midnight to complete it.
It's 3 small coding tasks.
Please treat it seriously set aside an hour either in CSE labs or at home and attempt it like it is an exam.
It's the only way to discover what you have and haven't understood about C programming
Assignment 1 is now available. We'll talk about in today's lectures. Its likely we'll add some clarifications to the specification over the next few days in response to questions in the class forum.
The fileserver which hosts the COMP1511 class account has been restarted.
give and autotest should work again,
The deadline week 3 lab exercise deadline is still extended to Monday midnight.
Hi everyone,
There seems to be an issue with the CSE servers and the course website at the moment, which means nobody is able to view the tute/lab exercises, run autotest, or submit lab exercises.
We're currently looking into it, and it will be fixed ASAP.
The submission deadline for week 3 lab will be extended until Monday midnight,
In the meantime, you can access a cached version of the course website (e.g. tute/lab exercises) at this link: http://bioacoustics.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs1511/18s1/
Note that VLAB and SSH are both working fine, you can still access the CSE servers to write code etc, but you won't be able to run autotest or submit using give.
The Digital Uplift Project aims to redesign, develop, deliver and evaluate 660 courses at UNSW Sydney over a period of five years, integrating the best available educational technology into existing courses. COMP1511 has been selected to participate in this project.
A research team from Educational Delivery Services at the Office of the Pro Vice-Chancellor,Education, led by A/Prof Mark King, would like to use data generated during the Digital Uplift Project as part of a research study. This study aims to help us understand whether the Digital Uplift Project is effective in increasing student satisfaction and helping you learn. Data generated during this study will be used for continuous improvement of the project and to support future models of learning design.
The research team would like to use data from the myExperience report, student performance, and student engagement with resources and activities in this course as part of the study. We are interested in analysing data for the cohort, and not for individual students taking the course.
Participation in this study is optional, and you may withdraw from the research study at any time up to the point that we have analysed and published the results. If you do not withdraw from the research study, your data will be used as part of our evaluation. If you wish to withdraw from the research study, please contact:
A/Prof. Mark King digitalupliftevaluation@unsw.edu.au + 61 2 9385 2845
Director of Educational Delivery Services, Office of the PVC(E), Library Building Level 10, Stage 2, UNSW Sydney
The first weekly test is now available.
Don't panic you have until Wednesday midnight to complete it.
It's 3 small coding tasks.
Please treat it seriously set aside an hour either in CSE labs or at home and attempt it like it is an exam.
It's the only way to discover what you have and haven't understood about C programming.
The 1UGC lecture stream has served its purpose, so there'll be no more lectures in Mathews B. If you've been attending those lectures, you should now attend lectures in either CLB7 or in Mathews A. There's no need to change your enrolment on the system. Just go to a different location for your lectures.
Welcome to week 2 - make sure you prepare for this week's tutorial and lab.
There are a five standard exercises to be done as pair. Several of them are easy and your tutors are going to give you lots of help.
There are two challenge lab exercises to be done individually. These will be too difficult for many people on the class at this early stage so don't worry if you can't get far with them.
Check the Help Sessions Schedule . One help session is on today (Friday) at 10am with lots of tutors helping. Please attend if you are having trouble understanding how to use Linux commands, how to connect to CSE or transfer files to CSE, anything in lectures or labs that you are unsure of, etc... If you can't attend there are more sessions next week.
Reminder: COMP1511 tut-labs start week 1. But all you have to to do is find your tutorial room. Your tutor will look after you from then. Unlike future weeks, no preparation is required and there is no assessment in week 1.
COMP1511 is an intensive introduction to programming and computing, designed for
COMP1511 is not compulsory for any other Engineering degrees.
You should check the program description for your program in the UNSW Handbook before deciding to enrol (or stay enrolled) in COMP1511.
The standard first computing course for Electrical Engineering and Telecomm students is COMP1911 Computing 1A, which provides a gentler introduction to programming (in C).
Most other Engineering students have ENGG1811 Computing for Engineers (an introduction to computational problem-solving in Python) as their standard first computing course, but can take COMP1911 or COMP1511 if very keen.
COMP1511 does not require any previous coding experience, but we will send out by email some suggestions for preparation that may help if you haven't coded before.